


Cruelest Month

by 2Hummingbirds



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Birthday, Character Study, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 09:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23848957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2Hummingbirds/pseuds/2Hummingbirds
Summary: Without his peers to give him social context Laurent finds himself unable to hold his shape, like liquid. But all liquid in the desert is a mirage… maybe he is not there either. The puddle of his identity sublimes.or:Five birthdays that are Laurent's and one that isn't.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Cruelest Month

1.  
They find him facedown in the sand and treat him for heat exhaustion.

The first thing Laurent asks for is word of his companions. They tell him he was alone, and that they had no way to know how long he had been lying there. Laurent does not think it is possible to feel worse; through the end of the world, his friends had been with him as a constant. Lucina and most others had been there since before he was born.

The reminder of how long he had been unconscious informs his next query: the date. His initial hypothesis is quickly proven false; he could feel worse. He’d woken up on April 25th.

 _Ah,_ he thinks. _Happy birthday to me._ It isn’t happy. He only thinks so on reflex. Because that is the only phrase in which _birthday_ is ever uttered. When you are at war with the Risen, every year gained is an accomplishment hard-won. New birthdays over time became less celebrated than a celebration in themselves. _Stop thinking the word birthday, Laurent._ Mild panic bubbles within; he takes another sip of water to push it down.

The initial slap to the face is replaced laughably quick with, as Severa used to so charmingly put it, a _nerd problem._ (Kjelle, more blunt than acerbic, once said he got caught in his own head in little details). Laurent contends with the imprecise measure of how much time his body had spent on this earth. 

Is he a year older now? Or will he have to adjust when he adds a year to his age based on the amount of time his body had experienced? The number of days between his birth and the ritual would count, of course; but there are an unknown number of days (though finite in range, based on how long a human could survive without water) between his arrival and awakening. To complicate matters, there are infinite fractions of seconds he could have landed at. So ought he take the difference from his departure date and his birthday and wait until a full 365 days in experiential time elapsed since his last one? And can he subtract from that any potential days that he’d been unconscious in this era? He doesn’t think he can bear having to keep track of three different ages; not that it would be hard, not for him, but it would mean a constant battle with himself to determine his own birthday.

Time travel had opened up a dizzying chasm of possibilities. With no practical way to ascertain how long he’d been alive, but with the distinct feeling that it is close enough to round to the date, Laurent resolves to keep his birthday the same to preclude any waffling over it. His mother would not accept anything untested like this, but Laurent is not as strong. He knows he’ll never know, but he can’t forgo this bit of his identity. Even if it is pretend.

Losing track of himself is something he makes peace with very quickly. Losing track of his friends proves far more distressing in the long run.

2.  
Ever upward. Excelsior means improvement, not elevation, but Laurent can’t help but think of it.

He climbs one of the weird rock spires in the desert that day. He’s a mage; it is easy. He can’t see anything but sand.

 _More like exile-sior_ he thinks, and then nearly sobs at how he has no one to share the joke with. Lucina wouldn’t get it but Gerome or Brady might whack him for it. Morgan would look at him like he hung the moon, or perhaps be jealous for not having thought of it first. But it’s moot, he thinks, because the pun is fundamentally about being here alone. He misses them all terribly.

Laurent had always thought of himself as a bit of a loner in the future, because he would sit at the edges of the group and be content to read quietly, but he realizes now how false that is. He had been surrounded by people. Blissfully, without needing to seek them out; and so the habit of seeking people out had never coagulated within him, or else it had atrophied to nothing, but the need was still there. Something as simple as attending lessons with a child his age had fulfilled a social quota he hadn’t known existed. Curious!

He resolves to never let them out of his sight again, when they find him. If they find him? It’s certainly taking longer than his initial estimation. It’s been an entire year, though it doesn’t feel real. Why, he longs for his friends and family as keenly as though they’d only been parted a week.

He had always, in the future, been an observer, and now there is no one for him to observe. Undaunted, clinging fast to this remaining pillar of his identity, Laurent observes what he can right now.

A sandy wind whips at his face and cloak as he sits on the spire and looks out. It’s wasteland, flat as far as the eye can see, sand limiting visibility from even this high vantage point. He didn’t come here to wait for them, not really, so he feels neutral about the empty view.

Without his peers to give him social context Laurent finds himself unable to hold his shape, like liquid. But all liquid in the desert is a mirage… maybe he is not there either. The puddle of his identity sublimes.

3.  
A mage is made by his books. A mage is made of freckles, dotting sun-browned forearms exposed between his split sleeves and leather gloves. Laurent walks out of the store and sweeps his fringe back, straightening Miriel’s hat on his forehead. It’s really his hat now.

He used to put it on his head as a child and it would fall over his eyes, almost knocking his glasses off, and his father had said _maybe if you read up more your head will fill up with words and fit in the hat like your mother’s_. A risible notion, but as mother would say, one he could not refute, for he had both read her books and any others he could find with a religious fervor, and his head had gotten bigger. A moment’s common sense could tell you that Laurent grew for the same reason every other living thing grew, and that it was mere correlation, but Miriel did not bow to anything less than rigorous and replicable testing, and certainly not to common sense. (Father would take this as her endorsement, the gleeful contrarian.)

Laurent wonders often if he will run into his parents, at the very least, since he knows they are alive now and should be easier to locate than his wayward childhood companions. But at this time, they are probably further north on the continent… or maybe even fighting in Plegia, a different desert altogether. In order to find them, he has to leave, but… it’s tough. He should be able to just do it, to go, but it isn’t that simple… there is the danger, the cost, the sparseness of caravans and untrustworthiness of the general populace. No one here he considers worthy of even a simple crosscontinental endeavor, much less the leap through epochs he had undergone with his childhood friends.

Despite craving companionship, Laurent has made no moves over the past two years to bond with the people of the desert settlement on a personal level. Any day now, his fool heart reasons, he will be reunited with his real friends, though he has made no tangible progress towards that goal either. Laurent has not fully made peace with the fact that it’s been years, _plural years_ , since he last saw anyone he really knew. He knows people here, of course; the people who feed him and sell him books and bread and pay him for his advice to their businesses. But he doesn’t trust them or love them the way he (even now) loves his old friends. He does not feel like he can wake up at 2 in the morning, walk over to their rooms, and unburden himself of the sorrow he feels over his missing mother, or the self-doubt that torments him in the day. With a start, he realizes he hasn’t had the ability to do that with someone in a very long time. Miraculous that it was something he had in the first place; perhaps that is why, only now, he can even begin to recognize that he is bereft of it.

Laurent completes his walk to the local reservoir and sits on the low stone wall at the edge to read his new books. Over the last year, he has thrown himself into rereading his mother’s journals and expanding his collection of tomes. He has made a hobby out of it. It’s funny, he feels, because his mother had tried so hard to school him in both verbosity and the act of casting magic, as a child. He’d taken to neither naturally, only willing himself to emulate Miriel more than anything else in the end. But left with nothing now, he finds he enjoys these things on their own merit. Furthermore, he is not as bad at them as he once thought. He chews through his birthday gift to himself that very afternoon, reading by the harsh light of the desert sun.

Being good at something he’d valued for so long is fun. Having control over something is fun. And if he pointedly ignores the knowledge that distracting himself with joke tomes is doing nothing to move him closer to the people he knows, well… he has a little more time.

This April 25th is on the whole an unremarkable day, except late in the evening, Laurent realizes that he is only a few years away from having the wide-brimmed mage’s hat in his possession longer than his mother did.

4.  
It’s funny how you can cling to people you haven’t seen in years. If Laurent is honest with himself, he doesn’t… he doesn’t fully remember all his friends. It goes like this: he remembers every day, embedded in his every nerve from scalp to toes, that he loves and misses these people. He remembers their names. He remembers… what they look like, when he thinks about it. But he really needs to _try_ to recall the specifics of why he loves them so much.

Matching wits with Severa, or taking notes with Gerome. Eating lunch every day with Yarne or Noire, when they were in Ylisstol for a few months. A great festival where Laurent and Owain had been the only two enraptured by a puppet show for hours, sitting still long after Cynthia cried to be taken home, until Owain’s worried father found them as the sun began to dip past the trees.

They are pleasant memories without doubt, but had it really been so little? What if his childhood friends had become unrecognizable in the interim? It’s alarming, concerning, to think of how they could have become completely different people. For some that he hadn’t met as long before the ritual, like Nah, Laurent is closing in on more years of _not_ -knowing them than he spent knowing them in the future. There is only so long one can cling to a false image of another person in one’s head; and he owes them better than that.

Word of the Exalt’s passing made its way down to the desert in the furthest reaches of Ylisse a few months back. Laurent is forced to confront that maybe he ought to try settling in a bit more than he has. That was it, after all; he had missed his goal. Time ran out. There wasn’t a point in trying to leave anymore. He spends his birthday taking notes as usual.

V.  
He seriously debates with himself the merits of using a spare wind tome to clean up the errant confetti. Ultimately his frugality triumphs- there is no such thing as a spare tome when he has an army to budget for. There shouldn’t even have been confetti, but Cynthia and Severa insisted and Laurent had trouble saying no when it was for Lucina’s sake. Laurent digs up a broom and begins to sweep out the mess hall.

Lucina walks into the tent from behind him, smiling. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you. Next week is your turn.”

“That’s not necessary,” he says.

“Nonsense, Laurent,” Lucina laughs, “you must celebrate or you’ll make me feel self-conscious for having such a fuss made over my birthday.”

“It’s only proper for you, princess, but I believe we’ve feted enough this month.”

Lucina gives him a sad look before changing tack. “Well- in that case I’m sure three birthdays of yours merit one princess-sized celebration. We do have two years to catch up on!”

Laurent shifts uncomfortably. He had evaded this conversation by keeping quiet when Lucina had met him the first time in this army - running up to hug him and exclaiming how much taller he’d become in the last _two years_. It was startling, so he investigated further.

Inigo had landed in Valm three years and seven months ago. Gerome, two years. Brady, Severa, two and a half years. Nah said she had been asleep for a while, and did not recall. For Cynthia, it had been a mere four months; for Owain, a little over a year. Yarne, Noire, Kjelle, two years. Morgan, with a furrowed brow, had told him “I don’t even remember leaving.” And Lucina… Laurent’s father informed him that she had first arrived right when prince Chrom met his master tactician, and even had a few run-ins with the Shepherd army back then. Of course it had only been two years for her. They were hard and lonely years, as they were for everyone else, but Laurent could not help but wryly observe that Lucina’s timing, like everything else about her, had been perfect.

_Don’t do this tonight. Don’t ruin her birthday, _he thinks, one last-ditch dilatory tactic. It is no use. Laurent cannot avoid it any longer, lest he make the jump from omission to outright prevarication.__

__As Lucina looks around for another broom, he says, “...Five.”_ _

__“I beg your pardon?”_ _

__“It’s been five years, for me. We all landed here at different times; I’ve asked around.”_ _

__She’s horror-stricken, and he experiences the expected dose of regret. Had he even wanted to protect her? Maybe he is jealous and wanted to ruin her birthday on purpose. Maybe - _don’t go down that road now, Laurent.__ _

__“Five years!” she cries. “Laurent! Five years without us! Why, you-”_ _

__“I’m older than you are, princess,” he says, feebly trying to divert her attention with shocking facts. _I’m not just mature for my age anymore, haha.__ _

__“You! Did not tell us anything until now!” she says, grabbing at the front of his cloak and hauling him around to face her. Tears begin to glitter at the edges of her eyes. They shine marvelously over her brand, he observes, dazed and unable to help an incongruous thought that has no business poking its nose into this situation._ _

__“It didn’t come up. It wouldn’t have helped anyone.”_ _

__“How can you know that?”_ _

__“It would only make people upset. It’s making you very upset right now-”_ _

___”It made you upset for five years by yourself!”_ _ _

__Lucina’s hands are tight in the collar of his cloak, knuckles white under her fingerless gloves. His eyes are starting to heat up too, now. Most inconvenient. He’ll have to find clean water later to remove the salt crust from his lenses._ _

__“All this, from a man who told me to stop hiding my pain.” Uselessly, he tilts his head, thinking _I should try not to get her hair wet.__ _

__“...Forgive me, Lucina,” he says, “it appears I have thoroughly spoiled your birthday…”_ _

__In the desert town where Laurent first landed, there is rain that night._ _

__5.  
“You shouldn’t have done this!” Laurent says, annoyed, as Cynthia drags him over by the arm. Severa gives him a shove to make him walk faster._ _

__“We were already going to, Laurent!” Cyntha cheers._ _

__“Captain’s orders, too,” says Severa._ _

__“Villainesses, the both of you,” he says, eliciting an indignant gasp from the sky knight._ _

__Over at the edge of a field, Morgan has arranged a great stack of books in rainbow order, but pauses to look up and wave. Lucina, Brady, and Yarne sit on the ground on the other side, smiling._ _

__“I told you this wasn’t necessary,” he says helplessly._ _

__“I disagreed,” says Lucina, simple as that._ _

__“I don’t even like attention! We should all be training! There’s a war going on! We had a party five days ago!”_ _

__“Don’t be ungrateful,” snaps Noire from behind him. “Our parents can handle the camp for one more day.”_ _

__“Training suits me,” Gerome says, abruptly. “Kjelle. Spar.” He has already started walking off._ _

__“Dramatic ass,” says Kjelle. “We’ll be about 20 paces away if you need us.” Cynthia runs after them too._ _

__Inigo claps a hand on Laurent’s shoulder and pushes him to sit. “And we are under orders to not let you work.” Irrepressible, he shoots Laurent a wink. “Apologies, friend.”_ _

__Owain and Severa have already flopped down in the grass, polishing a sword and cracking open a romance novel, respectively._ _

__“We’re partying Laurent style!” says Morgan cheerily._ _

__“We’re partying _boring loser nerd style_ ,” says Severa. She flips a page idly. Noire settles down next to her and brings out sinew for her bow._ _

__“You don’t have to do anything,” Yarne says. “You can even watch the training if you want. We’ll just be here.”_ _

__“If you don’t like it, I can think of a few of these history books I’d like to keep for myself,” Nah tells him. “These are your presents, by the way.”_ _

__“Got you those little gag tomes you like, too,” Brady says gruffly, still looking away. “Heard you like ‘em, at any rate.”_ _

__“Yeah. Yeah! I tested them out,” says Morgan, brightly._ _

__Someone starts to chide Morgan as Laurent makes himself comfortable, tucking his mage robes around his legs and pulling a tome with a sickly iridescent cover off Morgan’s smaller unsorted pile._ _

__“You picked mine out first,” says Lucina, smiling._ _

__“What else can I do?” asks Laurent, defenseless against the kind machinations of his childhood friends._ _

__“Suck it up,” says Severa, as Lucina answers simultaneously, “Well, it’s like what Yarne and Morgan already said._ _

__“You’re free to do whatever you’d like; you can do work if you think it’s important. We won’t even pay attention to you unless you ask for it.”_ _

__“You have my gratitude,” says Laurent, “but in that case, what part of this is celebratory…?”_ _

__Lucina puts her hand over his and opens the hideous book she’d gifted him._ _

__“We’ll all sit here with you the whole time.”_ _

**Author's Note:**

> I truly did not intend to have the big Isolation Fanfic come out during times like these, but I'll be damned if I miss Laurent's birthday for the third year in a row. As a joke to myself, the working title since 2018 was "5 times fic" since it is, through coincidence, five birthdays that are Laurent's and one that isn't. The final title is from The Waste Land.  
> It is easy to be in stasis, and be numb, until April throws it into sharp relief.


End file.
